The modem communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireless network technology, driven by consumer demands. This expansion of wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer and providing convenience to users.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. One ongoing area of development in networking and communication technology is the development of device-to-device (D2D) communication technologies. D2D communication technologies may use radio resources of a hosting cellular system, but allow two computing devices, such as mobile terminals (also referred to as user equipment (UE)), to communicate directly with each other without routing their communications through components of the cellular system.
Use of D2D communication may offer several advantages. For example, the direct communication link between mobile terminals engaged in D2D communication may result in reduced end-to-end delay time for data exchanged between the terminals as compared to indirect communication via cellular system components. Further, since communications may be offloaded from the cellular network to D2D communication links, network load may be reduced. Additional benefits of D2D communication may include improved local area coverage, improved serving network resource efficiency, and conservation of transmission power by both UEs and network access points. Additionally, D2D communication may support a variety of end user services, such as peer-to-peer applications, head-to-head gaming applications, collaborative applications, and/or the like that may be used by users of mobile terminals within close proximity of each other.